Libya to Halt Wages to Striking Oil Guards in Bid to End Protest

By Mariam Sami -
Oct 1, 2013

Libya’s main security force at oil-related ports and facilities will stop paying striking guards to
pressure them to halt disruptions that are crippling crude
output in the nation with Africa’s largest reserves.

The government is reluctant to use force to quell the
protests in eastern Libya on concern this may escalate the
dispute and poison relations among tribes, Brigadier Idris
Bukhamada, commander of the 21,000-member Petroleum Facilities
Guard, said in an interview in the capital Tripoli. The country
normally pumps more than half of its oil at eastern fields.

“We are a tribal society, and Al Jedran is from Al
Magharba tribe,” he said yesterday, referring to a former PFG
commander, Ibrahim Al Jedran, who with his brother Salem is
leading striker demands for better pay and changes in guard-force leadership. “The state is worried that the whole of Al
Magharba will retaliate if anyone is wounded,” he said. Al
Jedran’s tribe inhabits the Mediterranean coast from Benghazi in
the east to the central city of Es Sider, Bukhamada said.

Libya’s oil production dropped to 300,000 barrels a day
last month, the lowest level since the 2011 civil war that
toppled Muammar Qaddafi. The country produced about 1.6 million
barrels daily prior to his ouster. Output rebounded last year
before tumbling when the strikes broke out in July.

Foregone Revenue

The country’s largest oil port, Es Sider, and smaller ones
in the east at Ras Lanuf, Zuweitina and Hariga have been shut
since the end of that month, depriving the government of $5
billion in revenue this year, according to Naji Mokhtar, head of
the parliament’s energy committee.

Bukhamada, the PFG chief, ordered all members of the guard
unit in central Libya to re-enlist and accept the national
government’s authority or forfeit their salaries. About 2,000 of
this unit’s 3,000 members have done so, he said.

Al Jedran supports Libya’s return to a federal system of
government in which the eastern region of Barqa, also known as
Cyrenaica, would rule itself, while two other regions,
Tripolitania in the west and Fezzan in the south, would have a
similar status, Bukhamada said. The three areas were unified in
1963 by former King Idris I, whom Qaddafi overthrew in 1969.

Al Jedran, who was fired from the PFG, couldn’t be reached
for comment. Libya’s prosecutor general issued an arrest warrant
for him for insubordination, a guard-force spokesman, Walid
Hassan, said Aug. 22. In television broadcasts, he has denied
any wrongdoing, accusing officials of trying to bribe him to end
the protests and demanding that the government apologize.

Foreign Support

Bukhamada said he plans to withhold payments from guards
who continue to follow Al Jedran. The PFG is run by the defense
ministry and funded by the oil ministry with a monthly budget of
30 million dinars ($24 million), he said.

Prime Minister Ali Zaidan said Sept. 17 that Libya needed
additional foreign help to train its security forces and collect
weapons and ammunition lost after the civil war. Italian
ambassador Giuseppe Grimaldi offered yesterday to help the
country “find solutions to difficulties facing the oil and gas
industry,” at a meeting with Oil Minister Abdulbari al-Arusi in
Tripoli, the state-run National Oil Corp. said on its website.